There is an ideological fault line that divides the left from top to bottom. Nick Cohen, stands on one side of the split and, in an article for Standpoint, describes those who stand on the other:
Cohen is an angry man. He has every right to be, such is the decadence of his opponents on this issue. Consider, for instance, the following statement (from a prominent leftwing academic):
Whatever discrimination women still suffer in developed nations such as our own, it cannot be compared to what happens elsewhere in the world, where women and girls, in their millions, are exploited, enslaved, genitally mutilated, sold into forced marriages and murdered in so-called ‘honour’ killings.
But, hey, never mind all that – the real issue is that there aren’t enough female bankers and the Sun still has page 3 girls!
There are two further excuses that are made for glossing over the threat posed by Islamic extremism: firstly, that even if it does exist, it is a consequence of Western imperialism; and, secondly, that any pre-occupation with the phenomenon is motivated by Islamophobia.
Cohen’s response is scathing:
As for accusations of Islamophobia he has this to say:
What can possibly explain the indulgence that so many secular leftists display towards reactionary religious fanaticism? Nick Cohen's theory is as follows:
This is surely part of the explanation, but there’s something else. The extreme left, once in the vanguard of modernism, is now a predominantly post-modern movement. The old idea of a universal socialist world order has been discarded, replaced by a radically self-centred leftism, in which the only revolution that matters is the revolution that matters to me, me, me.
As a political philosophy it is probably less dangerous than its modernist predecessor, but only because it is so pathetic.